Building on his previous lectures on the shifts in the Enlightenment period that put Western civilisation on the course of global domination, Prof Wang Gungwu’s third lecture of his IPS-Nathan Lecture Series turned to the expansion of Western power across the world and implications for the ancient civilisations of Asia. From the 18th century, Western civilisations. Rather, it represented a fundamental paradigm shift as ideas of modernity and rationality were upheld as standards for all nations to strive for, while the other civilisations were marked as backward and under-developed.
Following the successful territorial acquisitions of the Dutch and British East India Companies, these companies, responsible for the wealth of their national empires, were eventually nationalised. This was partly in response to wars and conflicts that saw the military force of nation-states go hand-in-hand with commercial profit. Although the mission of European nation-states was meant to bring modernity and progress in place of the antiquated ancient civilisations, there were certainly brutal, “uncivilised” ways in which these national empires advanced their interests. However, the key difference from previous wars was the idea of nation-states that was inherently connected to industrialisation and imperial capitalism.
The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 marked a border between the Dutch and British territories that now divides the modern nations of Malaysia and Indonesia. In effect, this treaty left the Dutch to expand their conquest across Java, Sumatra and the other Nusantara islands, while British territory expanded inland towards Nepal and the Tibetan borders. While Spain had taken over the Philippine islands since the 1600s, the Dutch and British had control over maritime Nusantara while the French and British competed in continental Southeast Asia.
These colonial powers were conscious of the influence of the ancient civilisations on both local culture and the Sinic diasporic communities in the colonies. Local political leaders, however, may only have realised later the challenge that the “civilising” mission of modernity would pose to their own cultures. After all, they had always been able to adapt to the competing influence of the other ancient civilisations. In India, the Indo-Aryan base of the civilisation persisted under Islamic rulers, followed by the British, thus demonstrating the co-existence of three civilisations unconfined by political borders. The British thus learned to accommodate the civilisations they had limited understanding and respect for in order to maintain stability of rule.
Encounters of European Modernity with the Indic, Islamic and Sinic Civilisations
Despite religious differences between the primarily Buddhist Southeast Asian continent and the now predominantly Hindu Indian subcontinent, Indic influence remained strong in Southeast Asia. Hindu civilisation had remained resilient against the period of Mughal dominance in the region, and the entry of the British gave Indian leaders the opportunity to learn about ideas of modernity and political reform to advance their own interests. Ironically, it was exposure to Western education and the idea of modernity itself that bred anti-colonial sentiment in Indian leaders such as Tilak Maharaj and Mahatma Gandhi. They developed ideas of India as a nation with traditions and cultures that constituted a civilisation as strong as that of their colonisers.
Meanwhile, Indic civilisation came to interact with Southeast Asia in new ways under the reign of the British Raj. In the Straits Settlements, governed from Calcutta, skilled and unskilled labourers were brought in mainly from South India and Ceylon. This flow of migration brought further civilisational influence across Southeast Asia’s imperial borders. The British were forced to confront this with the Sepoy revolt of 1915 in Singapore that seemed linked to the Muslim Ottoman Caliphate.
In the largely Muslim archipelago, leaders had close contact with cultural and political centers of power in the Ottoman Caliphate, Egypt and Arabia. They shared the confidence of the Mediterranean polities that Islamic civilisation was not threatened by the Europeans. As in India, Islamic civilisation was seen as a strong alternative to colonial rule, and clashes against the Dutch from forces such as the Padri movement were partially motivated by Islamic civilisational ideals. However, only in the 19th century did leaders across Nusantara unite with Islamic leaders elsewhere with the consciousness of the threat that modern European civilisation posed.
In the Sinic world, China faced encroaching European forces both from the sea and overland. In Northern Eurasia, the Russians saw vast territorial gains from Islamic Central Asia, while the Russian Cossacks were also expanding territories in Siberia, conquering indigenous lands. In the Americas, European diasporic colonisers were also taking over indigenous land. By the 20th century, both Russia and America presented China with two different revolutionary paths based on two ideals of modernity.
For the British and French approaching from the sea, the unified dynastic empire of China had millennia of continuity rooted in texts of a common language, a centralised bureaucratic state and a common philosophy — factors that had endured and legitimised the reign of Mongol, Han and Manchu dynasties. However, Sinic civilisation had never been threatened by naval conflicts until 1840, when China was forced to cede Hong Kong to the British with the Treaty of Nanking. This led European discourse to frame China as a national empire like their own, where Manchus ruled over other ethnic peoples. In turn, Han Chinese sought liberation through European frameworks, as the Taiping rebels identified with Christianity and Sun Yat-sen led the republican revolution with ideals of a modern nation-state nurtured by his English education.
Eventually, the centralised dynastic state that had for so long preserved Sinic civilisation may have become a source of inflexibility and thus, weakness — they were unprepared to adapt to the Enlightenment ideals of modernity. As Meiji Japan turned decisively towards the West and wrested control of Korea and Manchuguo, the Sinic inter-state framework was broken down. In Southeast Asia, Sinic civilisational superiority was also challenged as the French were eroding Sinic influence in Vietnam.
From National Empires to Anti-colonial Nationalism
As modern European empires took over swathes of land in Southeast Asia to incorporate into their nations, their subjugated peoples used the concept of sovereign nationhood itself to turn against the colonists, drawing also from the ancient civilisations that had shaped their societies for so long. Prof Wang explained that the idea of nations as sovereign states comes from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which acknowledged the right of empires, kingdoms and principalities to have their borders recognised. Later, the revolutions that formed Republican France and the United States developed the ideals of civic nationalism.
“The popular will expressed through a democracy with ideals that included liberty and equality provided the model for the nation-states of the 19th century. They focused on being based mainly on a common language, one religion and a shared history, and were sovereign states with recognised borders,” he elaborated.
With the fall of feudalism and monarchies in Europe, industrial capitalism boomed and brought to the fore workers’ movements against the new ruling class. In the 20th Century, resistance to capitalism brought about communist movements as well. Two World Wars ensued as rival European powers clashed amidst their urge for imperial expansion, and the second marked the beginning of the end for the era of European national empires.
People of the colonies saw that their rulers were not invincible, and that they could combine elements of modern technology and popular sovereignty with local knowledge and culture to develop their own national identities. Thus, local elites in the Indic, Islamic and Sinic worlds embarked on efforts to enlighten themselves with the bureaucratic skills of economics, administration and management, developed educational institutions for their people and organised political parties based on mass participation. Often, they sought to replace the traditional hierarchies of the past with the political systems based on the rights of citizens. The Communist Bolsheviks who had overthrown the Tsarist Empire also inspired national consciousness in many Southeast Asian colonies. Ultimately, there was hope that they could realise new modernities and forms of these regional civilisations that were not inferior to Western empires.
“Altogether, there was a new awareness that the Enlightenment was only one phase of the modern. Those in Southeast Asia, inspired by new ideas of modernity, were confident that their own past experiences of learning from neighbouring civilisations made their local cultures strong,” Prof Wang concluded.
Question-and-Answer Session
The Question-and-Answer session was moderated by Prof Elaine Ho, Professor at the Department of Geography and Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
As Prof Wang had earlier noted that Buddhism had become the predominant religion in continental Southeast Asia while being rejected in its country of origin, India, an audience member asked how to make sense of the modern Indian state’s use of Buddhism in its strategies of soft power diplomacy, such as the Nalanda project. Prof Wang commented that the Indic worldview seems to accept the possibility of Buddhism developing in a completely different way outside India while still remaining linked to its Indic features. The elasticity of this worldview makes it easy for aspects of it, such as Buddhism, to be practised in many different ways. Thus, many people look to India as a spiritual home, even if their religious forms are unrecognisable to Indians.
Prof Wang then addressed a question on how local leaders in Hong Kong and Singapore may have learned from the failed empires, given that both territories were similarly governed in a “benign non-interventionist” manner in the colonial period. He noted that although there was a similar style of governance in Hong Kong and Singapore in the past, the reasons for this were different. Limited intervention in Singapore was because the British did not want to unnecessarily antagonise the Muslims in the region given historical tensions between Christians and Muslims in Europe. On the other hand, Hong Kong was mainly a commercial rather than imperial mission for the British, and was relatively inconsequential to the massive Qing empire. The majority of the population in Hong Kong was always Chinese and Hong Kong was always thought of as part of China in social and cultural affairs, even though it was legally British. Thus, Prof Wang suggested that Hong Kong has always been a matter of “one country, two systems”.
Finally, Prof Wang addressed a question on what made a nation superior, especially when it comes to colonisation. Prof Wang explained that the Enlightenment brought in many material benchmarks for civilisations such as scientific discovery and technological progress. This is what made Western empires dismiss ancient Asian civilisations, claiming that these civilisations were unable to modernise and progress materially and were hence inferior. He further elaborated that the divide between ancient and modern had already taken place internally in Europe in the 18th century. Although ancient Christian European practices were admired, they were deemed outdated and barriers to modern progress. This internal divide was then taken abroad to the civilisations they later colonised.
Click here to watch the video of lecture III.